Tag Archives: cinnamon

I’m not entirely sure why combining cayenne pepper and chocolate qualifies the chocolate as Mayan, but there are enough Google search results that mean it’s a thing, but nothing I could find that explained why, so I guess I’ll just have to take this one at face value. If it turns out that the Mayans really did combine cayenne and chocolate, then I think we can agree that that wonderful flavor combination more than makes up for their big snafu predicting the end of the world. That was a cheap shot, sorry guys.

I forgot how much I love making and eating cinnamon rolls until I made these for a work potluck, and now I kind of want to make them all the time. Maybe it’s time for Cinnamon Roll Sunday to go along with Muffin Monday? And then Sugar Coma Tuesday… And then a trip to the dentist on Wednesday. Sounds like my kind of week!

I know it’s only the beginning of September, and according to the forecast, it’s supposed to hit 90 this week in New York, but I’m more than ready for fall. My boots are all lined up in my closet, my jackets have come out of storage, and I’ve got a couple pounds of apples in the fridge, just waiting to be cooked down with cinnamon.

These muffins mark the beginning of fall baking season – here’s to crisp apples and spicy cinnamon.

Coffee cake is one of my favorite things in the world. It’s such a great, all-purpose cake – not too fancy, but not exactly plain either. Unfortunately for the coffee cake, I don’t think its name is doing it any favors. Tacking “coffee” on there makes people associate it with just breakfast or a coffee break, when in reality, it deserves so much more. Coffee cake should be a bona fide dessert. A coffee cake layer cake, perhaps? I’ll take a slice of that for dessert, and then another slice in the morning.

For this week’s Muffin Monday, I decided to go with something festive since it’s Mardi Gras on Tuesday, so naturally, King Cake! Now, the last time I had a King Cake was in middle school French class, so my memory of them has more or less disintegrated. According to the internet, they’re basically a giant cinnamon roll sometimes also filled with fruit and cream cheese and then covered in a simple glaze and colored sugar. I remember them being good, but pretty dense and heavy, and I knew that’s not how I wanted this muffin version to be.

I decided to go with a basic muffin batter lightly spiced with cinnamon and then filled with both cream cheese and sauteed apples. Then I topped them off with a simple glaze and yellow, purple, and green sanding sugar.

The end result has all the festiveness and deliciousness of a King Cake but is lighter and won’t weigh you down the way a typical King Cake does. Give up anything else for Lent, just not these muffins.

These are really, really pushing the boundaries of what we call “muffins”, but who really cares about semantics anyways?

So it’s the last week before December and I’m in baking limbo. I always felt like Thanksgiving signaled the beginning of the holiday season, but it came early this year and threw everything out of whack. It’s still November, so do I continue baking with pumpkin? But Thanksgiving’s over, so do I move on to peppermint? These are the things that keep me up at night.

Enter the mighty ginger cookie. It’s probably technically more associated with Christmas, what with gingerbread and all, but I think it’s a pretty good transition cookie, with cinnamon and nutmeg for fall and ginger and cloves for winter.

I’ve never made a gluten-free cookie before, mainly because I always thought gluten was crucial for soft and chewy cookies. But these cookies totally sink that theory – they’re lighter-than-air soft, and most importantly, they stay that way. And with a plate of these cookies, limbo doesn’t seem so bad.